Last August, Cornell launched the Life on the Hill project to allow prospective students get a feel for campus life. While this initiative faced criticism from independent bloggers, it was an interesting move nonetheless.

It turns out colleges have been exploring other ways of using blogs to attract applicants. Admissions offices, traditionally shrouded in mystery, are beginning to open up. Yale Daily News sums it up:

In recent years, the increasingly intense college search process has given rise to online forums in which college-bound seniors swap advice, statistics, and stories in order to increase their chances of acceptance to top-tier schools. Now, some colleges are bringing information to the students in the form of behind-the-scenes blogs and message boards that offer a revealing look at what goes on inside America’s most selective admissions offices.

Yale does not have an admissions blog and has no plans for one. A quick search reveals that neither does any other Ivy League school. The only exception is Cornell’s College of Engineering.

It’s certainly refreshing to see schools make a legitimate attempt to connect with the potential future students during the stressful application process. I can only hope that more colleges follow their example.

Charlie, a Goldman Sachs trader in London, was sent a warning by his employer for spending over 500 hours on Facebook over the course of six months:

It has come to our attention that you have been spending a considerable amount of time on a website known as ‘The Facebook’. This is unacceptable since firm regulations do not permit usage of social networking sites. Moreover, your combined total usage time over the past six months has now exceeded 500 hours (the equivalent of over four hours daily), which we feel would normally be sufficiently high to render us duty-bound to inform your manager. As a gesture of goodwill, we will not forward this email on this time, but would ask that you stop utilising this site, and in addition would advise you that this is your final warning and subsequent offences will be treated with more severity and through the appropriate official channels.

It’s a measure of how warped I’ve become that, not only am I surprisingly proud of this, but in addition, the first thing I did was to post it here, and that losing my job worries me far less than losing facebook ever could.